Strangled - Brian McGrory [68]
She said, “At least you picked a honeymoon destination that we’d never been to. I would’ve killed you if you went to Turks.”
The Turks and Caicos Islands, amid a stretch of too much arguing, near the end of a bitter winter. We were having yet another senseless fight over something we wouldn’t be able to remember the next day when she glared at me and said, “You know what the problem is with us? We don’t spend enough time together.” I mean, I always knew she could be counterintuitive, but this was the biggest bit of counterintuition that I had ever heard.
That’s when she flipped open the morning Record, pointed to an airline ad, and said, “We’re going here.”
“Where.”
“Providenciales.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know. Um, says here, the Caribbean.”
“When.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
And sure enough, there we were at the airport the following morning, bags in hand, frequent-flier miles drained out of our accounts, with two round-trip tickets to the Turks and Caicos Islands and a reservation for three nights at a beachfront guesthouse named Jose’s Place. I had created a rule for myself about never staying at a place named for the owner, unless it was Donald Trump or Steve Wynn. But in this case, every decent resort on the island was booked. Jose’s, for every good reason, wasn’t.
After Jose himself proudly showed us to our room, with the torn shade covering the single window, the scraped tile floors, the refrigerator-size closet, the Third World bathroom, we looked at each other, wondering what the hell we were going to do.
Ends up, we decided pretty quickly: we had sex. We had it in the room, immediately and urgently, then later, constantly. We had it that evening on a blanket under a coconut tree on the pristine beach as insects the size of dairy cows chirped in the nearby brush. We had it in the handicapped restroom of a very swank resort before the dessert course of our dinner the following night. We had it in the middle of the afternoon under a blanket on a dock during a passing rainstorm.
Not that I’m proud of any of this. Well, okay, maybe I am a little.
We also talked. We talked about the past, mine and hers and ours. We talked about the present. And we talked about the future, always as a couple, the challenges we’d face, the marriage we would undoubtedly embrace, the babies that would someday pop into our lives. And then we had more sex.
She wore a flower in her hair. The tops of our feet got brown. We’d walk the beach and look at the silent, sullen couples sunning themselves on the expensive chairs at their luxury resorts, knowing that our little eighty-five-dollar-a-night prison cell of a guest room back at Jose’s was the most perfect thing we could ever have imagined.
“I wouldn’t have gone to Turks,” I told her, solemn now. “That’s off the list.”
She squeezed my thigh. “Good,” she said. “Same here.”
We fell silent for a minute. Finally, I looked her square in the eyes and asked, “What went wrong?”
When she looked back at me, her eyes were glistening like the top of a pond after a hard rain, like they might spill over in even the slightest breeze.
She swallowed and said, “Life went wrong, Jack. Life. We didn’t share enough of it. You spent too much time looking at the past — understandably so. I spent too much time worried about the future — maybe just as understandably. And the moment kind of passed us by. Before you knew it, you and I weren’t really you and I.”
I saw a tear fall from her left eye to her cheekbone, then begin the long descent toward her neck. My reflexes wanted me to reach out for her. My brain kept everything still and in its proper place. Brains can be stupid sometimes, especially mine.
She added, “The thing with you, Jack, the thing with you, is that the dead people in your life keep on dying.”
She paused after this declaration, causing me to replay it in my mind. The dead people keep on dying. She always did have a pretty amazing way with words, as well as piercing insight. The problem now, though, was that even people who had never been in my life kept on